Extract data from multiple sources, concatenate it together, and sort it...

[iainr]

Hi Guys,

 

Attempting to do something which I'm not sure is possible (at least how I'm currently doing it). I'll try to explain as best I can.

 

I've got several different databases, lets say one stores information about people, one about trees and one about computers. The information in them is pretty unrelated, but each has a field saying when any record was last updated.

 

At the moment I'm extracting a list of all records in 'people' updated after a certain date (then printing them out), all records in 'trees' modified after a certain date (and printing them out), and the same for 'computers'. I want to sort the records by 'date_updated' as well - but if I sort each record set as it is extracted (using ORDER BY) I simply get people, trees and computers all separately printed out but individually sorted by date_updated.

 

What I'd like is a big list of records from all three databases, universally sorted by the 'date_updated' field, so the records could be all muddled up but in the correct order of date_updated.

 

I've attempted to feed the data into arrays but then realised if I sort one array the others wont follow suit and the data wont match any more,

 

Any advice on this is appreciated - also if it doesn't make sense I can try to explain again,

 

Thanks!

[Chris92]

Here are a few function you might want to look at:

 

http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-merge.php

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.array-flip.php

 

I wish you luck.

[iainr]

Thanks for your reply 

 

I managed to get it working using a multi-dimensional array combined with a custom sorting function!

 

Job done!!